Spanning fifteen years of expeditions first begun in 1975, this captivating, fully illustrated memoir takes the reader on a journey into the heart of the Kalahari Desert and records, from an outsider’s perspective, the vanishing hunter-gatherer culture of the San people (or ‘Bushmen’, as some call themselves) of the Kalahari.
Fifty years ago, a young South African psychology professor set off on the first of what would be many expeditions into the Kalahari Desert. There he began keeping a daily journal. Out in the bush he recorded his impressions of one of humanity’s oldest societies, even as it was disappearing before him. Half a century later, with the Bushmen’s way of life now mostly extinct, Allen Zimbler’s vivid words and photography provide a powerful depiction of a people who could survive in the harshest of conditions. Theirs was an deeply egalitarian, cooperative, knowledgeable and resourceful society, one in which men and women enjoyed equal standing.
But Bushmen are now threatened across southern Africa with marginalization and discrimination. Since diamonds were first discovered in the Central Kalahari Reserve in the early 1980s, the Bushmen of the region have been fighting for the right to their ancestral lands. They have suffered three big clearances – their homes dismantled, their water supply destroyed – and most have been moved to resettlement camps far from the reserve and forced to abandon their traditional lifestyle as hunter-gatherers.
With its tales of poison-arrow hunts, water making and bone-throwing divination, Kalahari Diaries offers a fascinating glimpse of a vanishing culture and invites the reader to consider a different, more harmonious way of living.
It includes a photographic appendix of Bushman artefacts from the author’s collection – of jewellery, utensils, toys and weapons, all crafted from bone, hide, eggshell, wood and seeds of the desert. It aims to raise funds to build schools for one of the last remaining traditional Bushman communities in northern Namibia.
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